DISCURSIVE GENRES IN MOTION: a reading of digital cartoons and their multimodal resources

Abstract

This article investigates the processes of meaning construction in digital comic strips from a multimodal approach, grounded in Bakhtin’s (1997) studies on speech genres and in Marcuschi’s (2005, 2008) contributions on contemporary textual genres. Using as corpus two online comic strips, the analysis integrates the theory of textual referentiation by Koch and Elias (2015) with the principles of social semiotics by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996), aiming to examine the interaction between verbal and visual resources in producing effects of humor and social criticism. The results indicate that the recategorization of referents (Koch, 2011), in combination with visual elements, supports the construction of double meanings, while irony emerges from the tension between text and image, according to the principles of multimodality proposed by Dionísio (2011). The characterization of characters, in light of Ramos (2016, 2017), intensifies the critique of contemporary social issues. It is concluded that digital comic strips, as genres shaped by semiotic hybridity (Teno & Bueno, 2023), demand pedagogical approaches that consider their multimodal complexity in order to promote reading competence in the XXI century.